Posted
by
samzenpus
on Thursday January 24, 2013 @12:27PM
from the life-found-a-way dept.

John "Jack" R. Horner is the Curator of Paleontology at the Museum of the Rockies, adjunct curator at the National Museum of Natural History, and one of the most famous paleontologists in the world. Known in the scientific community for his research on dinosaur growth and whether or not some species lived in social groups, he is most famous for his work on Jurassic Park and being the inspiration for the character of Alan Grant. Horner caused quite a stir with the publication of his book, How to Build a Dinosaur: Extinction Doesn't Have to Be Forever, in which he proposes creating a "chickensaurus" by genetically "nudging" the DNA of a chicken. Jack has agreed to step away from the genetics lab and put down the bones in order to answer your questions. As usual, you're invited to ask as many questions as you'd like, but please divide them, one question per post.

Assuming you had some great technology that could collect it, is there any possible source of dinosaur DNA that would allow a more or less complete rebuild of a dinosaur (again assuming great futuristic technology that can accomplish this - think nanobots and strong AI)? Or is all dinosaur DNA forever gone? Or is it an undecided question?

DNA breaks down too rapidly to be intact in soft tissues that old. One of Horner's students managed to find such soft tissues a few years ago, but since DNA has a halflife of about 521 years [nature.com] (depending on the environment), there isn't going to be any DNA left in it.

“I am very interested to see if these findings can be reproduced in very different environments such as permafrost and caves,” says Michael Knapp, a palaeogeneticist at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand.

The 20th anniversary enhanced version will return to theaters in a few weeks. Supposedly Crichton modeled the Sam Neill character partly after you. What positive and negative things did this movie do for dinosaur paleontology? I would have thought it got a few more children interested in the subject.

There was an article in Science giving advice to scientists who consult for movies.

Their advice was, don't expect them to be accurate. (Lumiere had people walking around the moon without space helmets.) Just try to get a few useful lessons in there.

One of the things that can work well is movies is showing how scientists work. The interpersonal relationships among scientists works well. Paleontologists throwing rocks at each other at scientific meetings, things like that. (I think that's actually happened.)

My son's really into that too. I like that they try to work some science into it. But while I have no problem with talking, time-traveling, train-riding dinosaurs, it bothers me that the female pteranodons have eyelashes.

I have always been upset that they explain how the steam engine works, but not how the time tunnel works. Maybe they think that wormholes are to advanced of a concept for per-school.

Well, it's possible to explain how steam engines work, because you know, we actually have steam engines. Wormholes may or may not exist at all, and if they do, we certainly don't know everything about them. And even if such a thing as a "time tunnel" is possible, it may or may not have anything to do with wormholes according to our current understanding. So really, there's no comparison.

If I were going to fund 1 program, which should I fund chickensaurus over resurrecting a Neanderthal, Woolly Mammoth, or a Tasmanian Tiger? I mean they are all valid – but please make your case on why you should go first.

If I were going to fund 1 program, which should I fund chickensaurus over resurrecting a Neanderthal, Woolly Mammoth, or a Tasmanian Tiger? I mean they are all valid – but please make your case on why you should go first.

If you can make something that passes as a dinosaur, you'll inspire a lot of public interest. Funding follows. Dinosaurs are just cool. A mammoth might work if a bit less well, but no-one would really care about the tasmanian tiger.

From time I spent playing with kids and miniature plastic dinosaurs, I imagine the popularity of your chickenosaurus project would be enormous. If you succeed, do you have a plan to fund future genetic research by marketing the animals as pets?

Little known fact: Utahraptors preferred English over Western style riders.

Some experts artue their physiology was better at digesting riding crops than spurs. But their penchant for renewable fuel makes me think they were just a bunch of socialist treehuggers who hated all things American.

Something that's always made me curious about Paleontology is how far the study has come. If we look back historically at how dinosaur bones were exhumed and treated, some of the methods were actually a little bit destructive. So I've always wondered how paleontologists today cope with the fact that 100 years in the future we will likely have technology beyond our wildest dreams that will be able to scan the ground and find fossils in their original preserved intact positions and when they are excavated the process will surely be much more refined and exact measurements will be taken to better understand dinosaurs. I'm sure preservation techniques and materials science will allow us to even better handle finds. How do you cope with this idea that hundreds of years from now your efforts might be seen as crude or arcane? Do you ever wish that some paleontologists of the past had just left the specimens lying there for a future paleontologist to properly handle? Or do you just see this as a necessary way to move forward? Building on that, is there an end-game for paleontologists where the entire Earth has been inspected/surveyed and how many years out is that (I understand that sensor technology would have to come a very long way)?

That's a chicken and egg problem. If the early paleontologists had never recovered their specimens, Mr. Jack Horner would never have been inspired to spend his life studying old bones. Likewise, if today's paleontologists didn't recover their specimens, then the future "perfected" paleontological methods would never come to be.

For a long time the primary source of money for scientific research has been the federal granting agencies (NIH, NSF, DOE in particular). All three of them are facing either budget cuts, budget stalls, or increases in their budgets that do not match inflation. This does not seem to fare well for new scientists or established ones who are looking to further their careers.

Where do you see research money coming from next? Alternately, are we looking ahead to a time where fewer people will be doing science because the funding just won't exist to pay even their meager wages any more?

How much have you been influenced by the attempts to breed back aurochs by the Heck brothers? The Heck cattle bear some resemblance to the extinct aurochs. The degree of success is controversial, because there are very significant differences between the aurochs and the Heck cattle. Some believe that the whole idea of breeding back is deeply flawed, because you cannot achieve a genotypical match by working from phenotypical measures..

On to my actual question: what do you think about the possible existence of Paleocene dinosaurs? I understand that any current fossil evidence for their existence is likely caused by reworked fossils. How likely do you believe it is that a particular dinosaur taxon survived a few million years after the extinction event, and what would be the implications of this occurring?

How likely do you believe it is that a particular dinosaur taxon survived a few million years after the extinction event, and what would be the implications of this occurring?

Last I heard, birds are a subset of dinosauria, and since I can see a couple of birds by looking over the top of my display, I'd say it was pretty much 100% certain that some dinosaurs survived that particular extinction event.

Well, I could have specified "non-avian dinosaur taxon" but that should be obvious by context. Birds were already somewhat diverse in the Cretaceous and any non-avian dinosaurs that survived K-T would not be ancestral to birds.

Could we hope to find for example Ammonite or Trilobite fossils on Mars, because there was once water there and Ammonites and Trilobites are what one might call "Standard Default Species Evolution Step" or an "Evolutionary Stable Species State" when there is water and you give things a few hundred million years ?

Domestication changes genes and presumably the epigenome. Wouldn't it be more reasonable to pick an undomesticated bird, perhaps a more "primitive" one than the highly domesticated chicken as the DNA source to "clone" a dinosaur?

I understand the reason for theropods having the need to swallow big hunks of meat but that capability would much more easily come from a wide jaw.

Theropods, I would think, wouldn't need to keep a narrow jaw profile like a snake because theropods didn't have to slither into narrow openings. There doesn't seem to be any obviously good reason for theropods to have a jaw that's narrow when they're not swallowing big hunks of meat and wide when they are.

How would you respond if a billionaire offered you, say, $100 million to fund a lab and give you the means to create a chickensaurus with one condition: They get the first able specimen to release it on a reserve, hunt it and kill it? I know it sounds absurd but I wouldn't put it past the GoDaddy CEO [huffingtonpost.com].

I know this is not really your area, but what are your thoughts on the recent discovery that early humans interbred with at least Neanderthals and Denisovans? Do you think there will be further discoveries of different Homo species that our ancestors associated closely with?

In science (even computer science) I have a lot of interest in what we know we don't know and what we don't know we don't know. With paleontology and it's subdomains -- specifically your specialty of dinosaur growth -- how do you deal with what must be an unbound realm of what we don't know we don't know? For example, isn't it possible that growth was regulated completely differently in dinosaurs than it is in modern day lizards and birds? Couldn't modern day hormones and endocrine system be much different than what was present in dinosaurs? When you publish research is it all based on assumptions? How do you overcome such an open system of possibilities?

So, let's pretend the K-T event never happened and dinosaurs survived into the Holocene. What do you think the world's fauna would be like now? How would dinosaur evolution have progressed? Assuming humans had still come onto the scene (because it would be so cool) would we have driven the dinosaurs to extinction by now?

There are currently ongoing attempts to bring back certain extinct species using recovered DNA. What is your prediction for the success of this? How long before we will be successful and what will be the first species we are able to resurrect?

When many of us here at Slashdot were in high school, it was more or less taken for granted that dinosaurs were cold-blooded reptiles with scales...and later, around college, books started to mention birds as the likely descendants of dinosaurs. Are big dinos like T.Rex, Stegosaurus, etc.still widely believed by researchers to have been cold-blooded reptiles, or is it more likely that dinos like T.Rex were more like a big ostrich than an alligator walking on its hind legs, and that they might have been war

Your work and courage in pursuing conclusions that observation provided should be an example and inspiration to everyone in the sciences. I am sure it has not only been a long road, but one filled with landmines and pot holes. For this, you are owed many more thanks than can be expressed only in words.

We all know Paleontology has a major problem in that its techniques for dating the organisms it studies regularly, as the dates are clearly so much further back than Biblical evidence clearly points. How much research now is going into reconciling your fields farcial dates with realistic ones based on the evidence?

Dr. Horner, you have inspired me to engage in the sciences ever since I was a little kid. Although I didn't go into the field of paleontology, I did study computer science and became a software developer for an education company. In my field, we are always trying to find ways to engage kids in the STEM fields to help develop the next generation of engineers, programmers, biologists, and even paleontologists. In your opinion, how do you see the future of your field within the next generation of scientists

What effects have you noticed on the field of Paleontology from the movie Jurassic Park, and your participation (as advisor) in it? More widespread misconceptions based on movie magic? More (or fewer) students? Funding?

This one is from my 6-year-old boy, Will. We're currently reading a book about dinosaurs (he gets three per bedtime). He wants to know, "how many dinosaurs haven't been discovered yet?" One of his favorites is one that was discovered in China fairly recently (many of the famous ones seem to come from the US midwest from the early part of last century).

While his question is impossible to answer on its own, do paleontologists have a sense of whether the types of soils likely to hold fossils have been well explored, or if we've merely scratched the surface [sic] of what's to come?

Why start with a chicken instead of an Emu or Cassowary? Those large flightless birds already look a lot more like dinosaurs than a chicken. They even have 3 toes. With a longer tail and some teeth they would seem very dinosaur-like.

Chickens are small and therefore more manageable than the larger birds, and they breed quickly. It's the same reason that mice are the main choice for mammalian models in biology, rather than say, pigs.

I don't have a question, but a comment on the Museum of the Rockies. This is an excellent little museum, and well worth the visit. Anyone who goes to Yellowstone, the 1.5 hour trek to Bozeman is well worth the drive. The drive will take you past many geological formations, such as the Devil's Slide [wikipedia.org], and often takes you past quite a bit of wildlife like elk, bighorn sheep, bears and bald eagles.

The museum is very enjoyable and educational for both children and adults.

Your famous for not having earned your degree, yet you persevered and your reputation for your work goes far outside your field. How hard was it to be taken seriously in your field without the required degree? I ask as someone who also works in a University at a senior level without a degree.

I have seen a protracted fungal spike mentioned as an argument against the Permian Triassic extinction being due to a single event [a series of bolide impacts, etc].

However, from what I had seen, that fungal spike appears only in the African karoo, which -- between that and the Hudson -- look to me like ideal candidate locations for de-Meijer/Van Westrenen style georeactor explosions (that, based on rings of kimberlites around both, and what looks like identical-shaped and identical- oriented scars in both

Since I've been reading Slashdot this is the "ask" article that has drawn the most joke questions, easily. Even more than RMS' article, and Jack Horner has a reasonable haircut and hasn't been caught on video eating his own foot scabs. Now some of the jokes are quite funny, but still...I hope the editors will pre-screen the joke questions out for him.

What is your opinion of the thick atmosphere theory which would render resurrecting an actual dinosaur impossible (i.e. it would explode due to the pressure differential) ? The theory with proof is posted at :http://dinosaurtheory.com/index.html [dinosaurtheory.com]

For myself, I take a hard interpretation of the scientific method that it only applies to predictions about the future. Predictions that can be tested. If I run an experiment and the prediction fails, the theory is invalidated. To pick an example from physics, if I throw a coconut, I should be able to predict where and how fast it will be at different times in the future during its flight. If the coconut didn't fly (within error) of Netwon's predictions, it would invalidate Netwon's Laws.

Dinosaurs are a monophyletic clade as long as you include birds, which descended from the Theropods.

Theropods and Sauropods [wikipedia.org] are much more closely related to each other than to lizards [wikipedia.org]. They're even both on the Saurischian branch. All of the above are Diapsids [wikipedia.org] in the Sauria clade, but the ancestors of the lizards and snakes (Lepidosauromorpha) branched off from the ancestors of the crocoldilians and Dinosaurs (Archosauromorpha). I've spent way too much time looking at dinosaur phylogeny lately.

In your view, was the T. Rex primarily an active hunter, a scavenger, or somewhere in between? A variety of models have come out lately describing the possible energetics for theropods and different conclusions have been drawn as to how fast the big guys could move - or how much energy they would have to expend in order to move at a certain pace.

Everyone's talking about re-creating famous species like the Woolly Mammoth, Tazmanian Devil, and dinosaurs. Are there any efforts that you have heard of to re-create lesser-known extinct species? Is anyone trying to recreate the Dodo (for food)? Glyptodon (as a pack animal)? The Giant Sloth (for fun)?

My son is a sophomore in college and is consider a career in paleontology. I don't really know how to advise him and not sure of the prospects. He has the passion, grades and ambition. What advice would you have for a young person enter the field and what undergraduate degree would you recommend.

I collect mineral specimens (primarily crystal-populated geodes) from the eastern portions of Fort Peck Lake, working my way along the shoreline. I also find, and collect, interesting invertebrate fossils such as crabs, clams and so forth. Vertebrate fossil collection is, as far as I know, illegal for the average citizen under any circumstances on public land, so I leave them where I find them.

The reason I collect at the shoreline is because the rapid erosion from the lake's waves constantly expose new spec

Dude - you ain't got the pecs to power the wings, and your dense, solid bones will make sure that you stay firmly planted on the ground. Sure, wish for wings, they'll just get caught in the car doors, caught in the elevator doors, and people on subways and trains will be trampling on your wingtips forever more.